Still warns against any knee-jerk reactions to goal shortage

Mike Simmonds

Hatters boss John Still isn’t keen on making any knee-jerk reactions to his side’s goal-shy start to the season.

Town drew another blank against York City on Tuesday night, their fourth in eight games so far, as they have scored just five times.

But although Still wants to give his squad every chance, the Luton boss has warned he will be forced to act if the situation doesn’t improve.

He said: “We’re always looking. For arguments sake, if certain people became available tomorrow, would we be interested? Yes we would.

“We’d have to loan them first, but I need to do this properly, I don’t want a knee-jerk effect.

“If I had a knee-jerk effect last year, Andre Gray might never have got in the team and might never have scored the goals he did.

“Lets just look at what we’re doing as a team at the moment and if we get to a situation where we go, we need to adjust this now because we’ve given this every chance, then we’d look to adjust it, but at the moment I’m okay with things.”

Still was always aware that his side might struggle to replace leading scorer Gray who joined Brentford in the summer without splashing the cash received for the striker.

The boss does retain confidence that the likes of Mark Cullen, Ricky Miller and potentially Charlie Walker can step up to the mark.

He added: “When you talk about replacing 30 goals at the level, you’re not going to do it, unless you go and spend the money that you just got for it.

“That’s why they paid the amount of money they did to get the goals. You can go lower down as we have done and try and find goalscorers and give them the chance to come on.

“You can look around at the slightly higher level at someone who might not be getting the best opportunity, which we did and made enquiries into that sort of player.

“But they weren’t available or ridiculous money. We always knew that we had to try and replace those goals, but it’s how you replace them.

“I we think we can share them around. We haven’t done yet, but we never scored loads at the beginning of last season either.

“We also we need to look at what we’ve got in house and see if we can provide the goals from the players we’ve got.

“Ricky Miller’s made a good impact at Dover, we’re very pleased with him there. Charlie Walker is now just getting into the full time mode in training every day which he didn’t find very easy.

“It’s the sharpist I’ve seen Mark Cullen, so if we can get people into the goalscoring positions, which we weren’t early on, I think we have players who can score goals.

“Will we replace someone with 30 goals? I don’t know, but we might find some 15s or 18s and they all tally up the same.”